History

From 2005-2008 there existed two separate XML formats for encoding raw spectrometer output: mzData developed by the PSI and mzXML developed at the Seattle Proteome Center at the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB). It was recognized that the existence of two separate formats for essentially the same thing generated confusion and required extra programming effort. Therefore the PSI, with full participation by ISB, developed a new format called mzML by taking the best aspects of each of the precursor formats to form a single one. It is intended to replace the previous two formats, which are now deprecated, although still sometimes used by older software.

On 2008-06-01, mzML 1.0.0 was released. In early 2009, several implementation efforts identified a few minor shortcomings in mzML 1.0.0. Since no vendors had yet released software supporting mzML 1.0 yet, the working group decided to release an update in June 2009. It is expected that all software will support mzML 1.1 as the long-term-stable format instead of 1.0. Below is the available documentation for mzML 1.1.0 and related information. Please send feedback to psidev-ms-dev@lists.sourceforge.net.

Status

mzML 1.1.0 was released on 2009-06-01 and has been stable every since. There were initial plans to update a new 1.2 release in 2017 to support ion mobility mass spectromy (IM-MS). However, as of 2017-11-03, it appears that support for IM-MS can be achieved without a schema change, with just some additional terms. Please contact psidev-ms-dev@lists.sourceforge.net for more information.

mzML Release Schedule

(updated 2017-11-03)

2008-06-01 mzML 1.0.0 released

2009-06-01 mzML 1.1.0 released

2010-06-01 mzML index wrapper schema updated to 1.1.1

2017-11 Minor updates to CV still occur, but no new schema changes are planned at this time

mzML 1.1.0 Finished Specification

(updated 2017-11-03)

The information and documents in this subsection are related to mzML 1.1.0, revised after going through the PSI document process on May 19, 2009. Everyone is encouraged to implement mzML 1.1.0. It is hoped that mzML 1.1.0 will remain stable for a long time.

NOTE: On 2010-06-01, the mzML index schema was updated from 1.1.0 to 1.1.1. There was no functional change, but rather the addition of an enumeration constraint to an attribute to prevent creative, unintended values. This could cause some files that previously validated to no longer validate. However, any such files should never have successfully validated in the first place.